Soul of an island home

Seaman Dan, a 74-year-old grandfather who made his first album three years ago, is booked to perform in the Netherlands later this year. To the singer, his songs of carefree island life are no more or less than an expression of love for his home.

From his years as a pearl diver to his recent incarnation as a crooner, there has been one constant in Seaman Dan's life - expressing his love of home through song. Michael Dwyer reports.

Seaman Dan met Eddie Mabo just once. It was over dinner at the old Royal Hotel on Torres Strait's Horn Island, "back before it burnt down".

Dan, a retired pearl diver, stock hand and prospector-turned-casual-crooner was impressed with Mabo's passion as a lobbyist for indigenous rights, even if he "didn't get the whole gist" of his conversation.

"He was talking about native title and he wanted the Murray Islanders to have their own land and be recognised as a people," recalls the 74-year-old Torres Strait Islander. "I thought, 'Well, that's fair enough, I'll go along with that'.

"It was a little different to my way of thinking. With my lifestyle, I've always been very happy, you know? I've always been easy-going. Politics I leave to other people. I just concentrate on music."

Since being discovered five years ago by a musicologist from Central Queensland University, Seaman Dan has been concentrating on music with a focus, and an audience that he never previously imagined.

He made his first album of sun-kissed, laid-back island blues, Follow The Sun, as a 71-year-old great grandfather, in 1999. He's already writing his fourth. This week he visits Melbourne for the first time. On Thursday, Mabo Day, he headlines the Reconciliation with Torres Strait Nations Celebration at the Hi-Fi Bar.

Short of the late Eddie Mabo himself, it's hard to imagine a more commanding voice to represent the region's rich multicultural heritage.

Seaman Dan's gently weathered baritone comes across like a languid sea breeze carrying about 130 years of Torres Strait history. "My great grandfather was Jamaican: Douglas Pitt," says Dan, who was born Henry Gibson in 1930. "He was one of seven people from the London Missionary Society who landed in New Caledonia in 1869." There, he married Sopha Wacando, the chief's daughter, no less, before the missionaries sailed on to Darnley Island.

Seaman Dan's grandfather was a pearl diver from the Cook Islands, and his father was the skipper of a vessel harvesting trocus shells. But with war looming in the Pacific, it would be some years before young Henry could follow in their footsteps.

European settlers and "half castes" were evacuated from the Torres Strait Islands in the early-'40s. Seaman Dan's future home of Horn Island became a base for 5000 troops and was hit by eight Japanese air raids.

His family relocated to Coen, halfway between Cairns and the tip of the Cape York Peninsula. "My mum was cooking at the hotel and I'd go down and work on the cattle station, muster cattle and help with the branding," he says. He acquired a guitar at 14 and one of his earliest songs, Little Pony, stems from this period.

In '43 he was drawn back to the sea, 600 kilometres south to Cairns. "I wanted to join the merchant navy but I went up to the employment office and they said, 'Oh, you're too young'. They sent me to the ply mill, Hancock and Gore, to work there. When I was 16, I left the mill and went out swimming for trocus along the Barrier Reef. That was used then for pearl buttons."

The name Seaman Dan had stuck by the time he returned to Thursday Island in '47.

"I was still a deckie on this pearling vessel and the skipper, the stern diver, he said, 'Would you like to put the helmet on and go down?' That's every deckie's wish, to put the helmet on and go down, pick up pearls. When you put that helmet on, you're somebody."

Seaman Dan's silky singing voice found a wider audience when he joined a pearling vessel based in Darwin in '52. Renowned in the area for his star turns at parties, he was invited to take up a Saturday night residency at the Hotel Darwin.

"I used to sing Nat King Cole's Embraceable You and Makin' Whoopie," he says. "And once the audience knew I was from Thursday Island, they always asked me to sing Old TI. "Every time I sang that song I'd get homesick. So in 1956 I joined Commonwealth Fisheries as a pearl diver, to go back to TI."

Seaman Dan wore a diver's helmet for the last time in 1963. He'd survived countless schools of circling sharks, and even a dose of the bends, after surfacing too fast from 30 fathoms at Darnley Deeps, north-east of Thursday Island.

Twenty years ago, the Mills Sisters had a minor hit with one of Seaman Dan's songs, TI Blues. But he was content to remain a legend in his own backyard until a visit from Central Queensland University's Dr Karl Neuenfeldt, who has co-produced three of Dan's albums.

"The thing that quickly struck me as unique," says the Canadian expat and Australian indigenous music researcher, "was that they've had a world music scene there since TI was founded because of the incredible multicultural mixture in the community. Melanesian, Aboriginal, Japanese, Indonesian, Malay, African, American - these cultures all had a presence, as well as a very large Polynesian influence from the early missionaries."

The culture is also remarkable for its "social singers" - talented vocalists who perform at community events and parties. Neuenfeldt was struck not only by Seaman Dan's rare quality as a singer, but by the historical value of his unrecorded songs.

"Seaman Dan sings songs that were part of an oral tradition, and now they are being put in fixed form. They're songs of place, but they're also songs of a cultural mixture that's unique in Australia."

To the singer, his songs of carefree island life are no more or less than an expression of love for his home. The feeling has proven contagious as far south as Adelaide and Canberra, where his latest album, Perfect Pearl, was album of the week on ABC radio stations in January.

Later this year, his ever-widening touring circle will take him beyond the Pacific for the first time when he performs in the Netherlands.

"It makes me happy to sing," he says simply. "Especially when I see people smiling back at me. I always say, 'Gee whiz, this is wonderful. I must be doing something right'."

Seaman Dan celebrates Mabo Day at the Hi-Fi Bar on Thursday with King Kadu, Liz Cavanagh, Maryanne Sam, John Harding, the Loza Dancers and guest speaker George Pitt. He also plays the Cornish Arms on Friday. Perfect Pearl is out on Hot Records.